Floor Statements

Mr. President, first of all, let me congratulate Senator Brown and Senator Casey and all the work they put into this effort and Chairman Wyden for his negotiation to where we are right now.

This is a big deal for Rhode Island. We actually tried the child tax credit during COVID. We know how it works. It helped 174,000 Rhode Island families through COVID, and what we saw is that it lifted many of them out of poverty, and what else we saw is that it enabled parents to get into the workforce.

There is a phony narrative that if you give the child tax credit to families, they will just avoid work. Our experience was the opposite. Once you had child tax credit revenues and you could afford, for instance, childcare for your kid, then you could go to work. And, of course, we needed a workforce through COVID, so people were paying attention to this, and that was our experience. This is a pro-child and pro-work tax credit.

Now, you think it would be an easy slam dunk over here because it came through the House with a big bipartisan vote and the corporate benefits included in this bill far exceed the family benefits included in this bill. So you would think our Republican friends who are all about corporate tax benefits would be saying, hey, 3 to 1, 4 to 1, whatever the ratio is, we won this one big, let's close the deal; I support this even though it is a little bit out of balance. The Budget Committee did the work that showed the imbalance problem. We can always go back and solve the balance problem later. Families can't wait for the child tax credit. This really matters.

I support this deal, and I also support having a memory as we go forward and as we further decorrupt our Tax Code about how to bring that better into balance. It ain't forever. The child tax credit is the key here. I will only add that the low-income housing tax credit that is in here as well is extremely important. It is very important to Rhode Island. We have a housing crisis in Rhode Island. We have exactly zero of our municipalities left in which it is affordable for the average family to be able to own a home. And we have one--one--in which it is affordable to be able to rent a home.

So we have a lot of work to do, and the low-income housing tax credit is a huge lift that allows our very experts and very able housing community to build more and revamp more and produce more housing to meet the needs and quell the crisis.

So I will close by thanking Chairman Wyden for his leadership and his skilled negotiations that have gotten us to this point. And I hope that common sense, what is good for children, what is good for work, and what is good for the corporate sector can prevail here in the Senate.

(Ms. CORTEZ MASTO assumed the Chair.)

Mr. President, I am back now for the 33rd time to keep shining a little light on the rightwing billionaires' covert scheme to capture and control our Supreme Court.

As a result of that scheme, the Court's rightwing just took a wrecking ball to the government's ability to protect Americans from big polluters and corporate cheaters.

This year's billionaire bonanza came through four decisions that gutted administrative Agencies' ability to do their job--perfect payback to the polluter billionaires who helped foot the bill to get these Justices onto the Court in the first place.

The first decision is Ohio v. EPA, where the Supreme Court undermined the Environmental Protection Administration's ability to enforce the ``good neighbor'' provision of the Clean Air Act, the provision that defends the air quality of ``downwind'' States like mine, Rhode Island, from powerplants and industrial facilities in ``upwind'' States, where sometimes they build the smokestacks extra high so that the pollution doesn't hit the polluting State, but it floats over and comes down and hits us in Rhode Island.

Without even full briefing on the merits, industry litigants succeeded in getting the Court to stall proposed clean air regulations and place a thumb on the scales in favor of polluters. At the hands of the Federalist Society Justices, the right of polluters to pollute beat the right of Rhode Islanders to breathe clean air.

Then came SEC v. Jarkesy, where the rightwing Justices undercut the ability of Federal Agencies to hold fraudsters accountable through administrative enforcement proceedings.

The Court held that civil penalties for securities fraud required a jury trial under the Seventh Amendment, undermining administrative adjudication in all sorts of civil enforcement proceedings across the Federal Government--protecting consumers from predatory financial institutions, workers from unsafe conditions, and the environment against polluters.

I am angry that the Court picked this case to express concern about the right to a civil jury while it has been busily eroding that same civil jury right when doing so favored big corporations over regular people.

If you are a fraudster on the losing end of a regulatory violation, they are all about the Seventh Amendment. If you are a consumer or employee injured by a big business, off you go to private, secret, mandatory arbitration.

At the hands of the Federalist Society Justices, the right of fraudsters to commit fraud defeated the right of people to be protected from fraud.

In Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, the Court overruled 40 years of precedent granting what is called Chevron deference to Federal Agencies when they are implementing laws that protect health, safety, and the environment.

Chevron recognized that courts should defer to an executive Agency's reasonable interpretation of a statute it is charged with administering. Just reading that sentence tells you how eminently reasonable the rule was. Plus, Congress can't be expected to make fine- grained determinations in technical areas that are best left to experts with decades of training and experience.

In Loper, the rightwing Justices removed that deference to expertise. The result? Look at this Washington Post headline: ``Corporate lobbyists eye new lawsuits after supreme court limits federal power''-- more ways for polluters to stall regulations with delays that could save polluters billions.

Just to read this text:

Mere hours after the Supreme Court sharply curbed the power

of federal agencies, conservative and corporate lobbyists

began plotting how to harness the favorable ruling in a

redoubled quest to whittle down climate, finance, health,

labor and technology regulations in Washington.

These cases are a power grab by a captured Court, transferring regulatory authority from an elected Congress and an elected executive to an unaccountable judiciary ill-suited to make such technical determinations.

Almost laughably, as they did this, Justice Gorsuch had to amend his opinion in that Ohio v. EPA case because he confused ``nitrous oxide''--laughing gas--with ``nitrogen oxides'' that were the subject of that case. So much for judges knowing technical stuff better than the experts.

The right of Federalist Society judges to make up fake science for billionaires triumphed over the right of regular people to have real experts defend them.

Finally, in Corner Post v. Federal Reserve, the Court held that the 6-year statute of limitations to challenge a Federal Agency's action begins when a person or entity challenging a rule is allegedly injured--maybe decades after the rule became law.

Every regulation can now be litigated for eternity. Agencies will be perpetually vulnerable to litigation on every rulemaking stalled by deep-pocketed litigants armed with exotic legal theories and the backing of this captured Court.

As Justice Jackson wrote in her dissent in Corner Post:

The tsunami of lawsuits against agencies . . . has the

potential to devastate the functioning of the Federal

Government. Even more to the present point, that result

simply cannot be what Congress intended when it enacted

legislation that stood up and funded federal agencies and

vested them with authority to set the ground rules for the

individuals and entities that participate in our economy and

our society.

At the hands of the Federalist Society Justices, the power of special interests to tangle up regulatory Agencies has defeated the right of taxpayers to protection from those special interests.

Here is how I explained that protection in my amicus brief in the Loper case:

Over the last century, our society has advanced remarkably.

As industries and corporations grew, their motive to maximize

profits caused social harms and threatened

consumer safety. Regulation responded. Heavy equipment and

dangerous chemicals came to mines, factories, and

construction sites; regulators implemented workplace safety

standards. Meatpacking and mass production . . . ballooned;

regulators implemented sanitation requirements in production

facilities. Americans widely adopted automobiles; regulators

required seat belts and air bags.

The modern economy necessitated a modernization of the U.S.

regulatory framework. Congress responded to the complexities

of the modern world by ensuring that administrative agencies

have the capacity, flexibility, and expertise to respond to

new developments. Part of that project was delegating clear

and broad authority to executive agencies and allowing those

agencies to adopt and adapt regulations to respond to new

hazards.

As a result, daily life in the United States is safer.

Workplace illnesses, injuries, and deaths declined. Children

on average have lower levels of lead in their blood.

Foodborne illnesses that used to kill thousands of people per

year have been practically wiped out. Highways are no longer

``carnage,'' and air travel is even safer than highway

travel.

So why tear down what has worked so well for generations? Well, the billionaire-funded think tanks say it is to strip power from so-called ``unaccountable bureaucrats.'' They love to talk about unaccountable bureaucrats--except that Federal Agencies are not unaccountable. Indeed, they are way more accountable than judges.

Again from my Loper brief:

Agency experts report to politically appointed executive

agency heads nominated by the President and confirmed by the

Senate.

Accountable.

These agency heads serve at the pleasure of the president,

who is accountable to the people. If the public is unhappy

with how agencies are implementing Congress's policies,

voters can make that known at the ballot box.

Congress oversees agency actions through legislative

committees dedicated to agency oversight, and regularly

conducts oversight hearings where heads of agencies are

called to account. Congress retains the power to enact

legislation to limit or reverse agency rulemakings if it

disagrees with the agency's actions, in some cases on an

expedited calendar. Furthermore, Congress holds the power of

the purse; every appropriations bill presents an opportunity

to expand, correct, or contract agency authorities. If the

public is unhappy with how Congress is holding agencies

accountable, voters can make that known at the ballot box.

Finally, agencies are accountable to the judiciary, which

has the authority to review an agency's statutory interpretations and actions to ensure the agency's decisions are reasonable and follow appropriate processes and procedures.

The myth of unaccountable administrative Agencies is a fake. The real objection is that career Agency employees are experts and can go toe- to-toe with industry trickery. And worse, for polluters, they can't put the fix in politically with a big campaign contribution or a couple of million dollars to a super PAC because Agencies are forbidden to take political considerations into account, and they are forbidden to self- deal.

All of this wreckage of the longstanding protections of our administrative process was done by polluters who fund the Republican Party and paid to stack the Court that dark money built, and this is the polluters' payday.

A whole smelly ecosystem of secretly fronted front groups is involved. Anti-regulation doctrines get cooked up in rightwing hothouses funded by polluters. The doctrines get amplified by rightwing front groups funded by polluters. They then get fed to the Court via little flotillas of rightwing amici funded by polluters. Secret, dark money funding from billionaire special interests underpins the entire operation. Much of this is the Koch Industries' political influence operation--a powerful, rightwing, dark money political polluter network.

Look at that Loper case. The lawyers who represented the petitioners in that case worked for free--supposedly--for a public interest law firm supposedly called Cause of Action. Interesting law firm: It discloses no donors, and it does not report any employees. In fact, the New York Times discovered the group's lawyers who supposedly work for Cause of Action actually work for Americans for Prosperity, the main battleship of the Koch political front group armada--an operation that is so cozy with the far-right Justices it helped put on the Supreme Court that Justice Thomas has repeatedly flown out to join fundraisers for Koch political operations, including Americans for Prosperity.

Here is the flotilla of front groups that appeared in Loper as amici curiae: the Buckeye Institute, the Cato Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Landmark Legal Foundation, the Mountain States Legal Foundation, the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation, the New Civil Liberties Alliance, the Pacific Legal Foundation, and, of course, our dear friends the U.S. Chamber of Commerce--a proper murderers' row of polluter mischief. And who are they funded by? Oh, let's look. DonorsTrust, the Donors Capital Fund, Koch family foundations, the Bradley Foundation, and ExxonMobil itself.

DonorsTrust and Donors Capital Fund are so-called donor-advised funds. They don't actually do anything. They don't actually produce anything, build anything. What they do is provide rightwing identity- laundering services. DonorsTrust has been described as the ``dark-money ATM of the right'' and, with Donors Capital, has laundered over a third of a trillion dollars into climate denial operations.

If you are ExxonMobil or a billionaire polluter and you want to support climate denial but you don't want your name on the phony front group that is doing the climate denial work, you send your check to DonorsTrust, and they take it and they send the money where you tell them--to the other group--only it is disclosed by them as coming from DonorsTrust. It is an identity-laundering operation for dark money political influence.

Some amici also were funded by front groups affiliated with Leonard Leo, whom we know as the billionaires' operative in the Court capture operation. The Loper amicus Advancing American Freedom received $1.5 million from Leonard Leo's Concord Fund between 2020 and 2021--$1.5 million. Leo's Concord Fund, which is this operation on this graphic, operates also under the fictitious name of the ``Judicial Crisis Network.''

When I say ``fictitious name,'' I mean that under Virginia corporate law, Concord Fund has filed ``Judicial Crisis Network'' as a fictitious name--term of art in the law--under which it is allowed to operate without disclosing that it is actually the Concord Fund.

Through the Judicial Crisis Network, Leo and his confederates spent millions of dollars on the Court capture operation: TV ads, barrages of TV ads, huge checks in for $15 million and $17 million from undisclosed donors to pump the rightwing Justices that they had chosen through confirmation.

So this same group that helped push the Justices from the Federalist Society lists onto the Supreme Court then files a brief through Advancing American Freedom--$1.5 million from Concord into Advancing American Freedom.

This whole thing is a billionaire-backed shell game in which the Court willingly participates.

The connection between Court capture and regulation destruction--that is not even in dispute. The Court capture operation and the anti- regulatory operation were admitted by Trump's White House Counsel, Don McGahn, to be--and I am quoting him here--``two sides of the same coin.'' You stack the Court to tear down the regulations so your polluters are happy and they fund your effort to stack the Court and support Republican power. And about this slate of recent decisions I have just discussed, he proudly told the New York Times--and I am quoting him again--``None of this was an accident.'' ``None of this was an accident.'' Indeed. It was bought and paid for.

There is considerable literature about a phenomenon called regulatory capture, sometimes called Agency capture. It is the capture of regulatory Agencies by industry to corrupt government decisionmaking. You can imagine railroad barons taking over a railroad commission whose job it is to set the rates for their railroads.

Well, the Supreme Court has been captured in the same way. This was no small or incidental undertaking. True North Research estimates that at least $580 million has been spent on the Court capture operation. These groups were a significant part of it, and these groups enjoy the benefit of it.

Now, $580 million is a lot of money, but just these four decisions are payback for the polluters that makes that $580 million a cheap investment. And

the public will pay the price, but that is a price that this captured Court is happy to have the public pay.

I am going to conclude with Justice Kagan's dissent in the Loper case. She pointed out--because she saw this game play out right in front of her. She is over there on the Court watching this game play out. She pointed out that the polluters' Justices stopped applying the Chevron doctrine back in 2016 as part of a plan because, she said, they were--and I am quoting her here--``preparing to overrule Chevron since around that time''--an 8-year-long plot to take out a precedent that bothers polluters. Forget calling balls and strikes; these Justices were on a multiyear billionaire polluters' mission.

It is not just Chevron; this is a pattern.

As Justice Kagan went on to say:

That kind of self-help on the way to reversing precedent

has become almost routine at this Court. And here is how she describes it: ``Stop applying a decision where one should; throw some gratuitous criticisms into a couple of opinions; issue a few separate writings questioning the decision's premises; give the whole process a few years . . . and voila!--you have a justification for overruling the decision,'' something she called an ``overruling-through-enfeeblement technique [that] mock[s] stare decisis.''

As she described it, this captured Court, at the big donors' direction, stalks for years and then kills off precedent that the billionaires don't like, precedent that interferes with their polluting or interferes with their cheating.

That stalking and killing plan may be a lot of things, Mr. President, but I will tell you what it is not: What it is not is judging.

To be continued.

I yield the floor.

That would be Senator Reed, Mr. President. Am I recognized?

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to legislative session for a period of morning business, with Senators permitted to speak therein for up to 10 minutes each.

Madam President, I have seven requests for committees to meet during today's session of the Senate. They have the approval of the Majority and Minority Leaders.

Pursuant to rule XXVI, paragraph 5(a), of the Standing Rules of the Senate, the following committees are authorized to meet during today's session of the Senate:

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 765, remembering the Honorable James Mountain Inhofe, which is at the desk.

I ask unanimous consent that this resolution be agreed to, that its preamble be agreed to, and that the motions to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I take a moment to offer my condolences to Senator Inhofe's family and friends.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the consideration of S. Res. 766, submitted earlier today.

I ask unanimous consent that the resolution be agreed to and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table with no intervening action or debate.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration Calendar No. 246, H.R. 1105.

I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Finance be discharged from further consideration of S. 159 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

I now ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs be discharged from further consideration of S. 3068 and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and that the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Senate proceed to the immediate consideration of Calendar No. 428, S. 4351.

I ask unanimous consent that the bill be considered read a third time and passed and the motion to reconsider be considered made and laid upon the table.

I yield the floor.

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, I am back with my trusty, battered ``Time to Wake Up'' chart, and the last time I spoke on the Senate floor on this subject, I reviewed some recent warnings from the Economist magazine, from the Potsdam Institute, and from the consulting firm Deloitte that climate change is poised to cause tens of trillions of dollars in damage around the world--tens of trillions of dollars. Much of it, of course, right here in the United States.

Well, not surprisingly, the insurance industry has concern about forecasts of damages in the tens of trillions. The Senate Budget Committee recently held a hearing examining insurance, property, and mortgage markets in Florida, a State that is on the leading edge of climate-related risks.

Insurance, property, and mortgage markets are intertwined. To buy property, most people need a mortgage. To get a mortgage, you need insurance.

In our hearing, Dr. Ishita Sen, a professor of finance at the Harvard Business School, told about the danger to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, our Federal mortgage giants. They require insurance from insurers that have a financial strength rating from a ratings agency, to assure that the mortgages they purchase are protected by reputable, financially solid insurers.

Bad insurance increases their risk of homeowner default, as homeowners are way more likely to walk away from properties if their insurance company can't pay claims or won't pay quickly.

Dr. Sen's research in Florida found several disturbing things. First, she found that larger, stronger insurers are exiting Florida and being replaced by smaller, less financially sound companies and by Citizens Property Insurance, the State-backed insurer of last resort.

Second, she found that these smaller private insurance companies were all receiving their financial ratings, required by Fannie and Freddie, from the same ratings agency, known as Demotech. If you haven't heard of it, it is because it hasn't been around long.

Third, she found that Demotech ratings appeared to systematically overestimate the financial strength of the rated insurers. Nineteen percent--nearly 1 in 5--of Demotech insurers in Florida became insolvent between 2009 and 2022.

Fourth, she found that mortgage lenders were loading up those mortgages insured by Demotech-rated insurers to Fannie and Freddie, compared to properties with insurers using other rating agencies.

What does that mean? It means Florida's mortgage risk is being transferred to the taxpayer and to pension funds for millions of Americans that commonly purchase mortgage-backed securities. All of this should ring a bell--a hell of a bell.

Remember the 2008 financial crisis. It, too, began in the residential real estate and mortgage markets. It too had Florida as its epicenter. It too involved ratings agencies handing out inflated ratings. It too involved mortgage-backed securities, securitized by Fannie and Freddie and sold around the world.

That 2008 financial crisis led to the great recession, in which millions of Americans lost their jobs, their homes, and much of their household wealth. Unemployment topped 10 percent. Five trillion dollars was piled on our national debt.

So when we start seeing parallels to things that went awry back then, we should wake up and take them seriously.

Dr. Sen said this about the climate risk we face:

Not only do we need to harden our homes, but we need to

harden our financial institutions, our banks, and our

insurance companies in order to make them withstand really

large climate shocks that are for sure coming their way.

Well, when she talks about ``really large climate shocks that are for sure coming their way,'' that means they are for sure coming our way, because just like 2008, if this goes down, everyone suffers.

At this point, we have dawdled on climate for far too long. We have let the fossil fuel industry for decades obstruct action on climate change.

Now, with financial warnings in the trillions, the Deloitte report said:

The global economy needs to execute a rapid, coordinated

and sequenced energy and industrial transition.

Well, I promised in my last ``Time to Wake Up'' speech that I would discuss how best to execute that rapid transition. So let me turn to that.

I will begin by acknowledging that Democrats took the first serious legislative step on climate in 2022 with the Inflation Reduction Act, or the IRA. The IRA was modeled to reduce emissions by around 40 percent by 2030, compared to a 2005 baseline, which is great. But we need to reduce emissions not by 40 percent but by 50 percent by 2030, and to get to net zero emissions by 2050, if we are going to hold warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

Even if we do that, the climate havoc we are already seeing will get worse.

The climate havoc we are already seeing is at about 1.2 degrees Celsius.

So what more do we need to find a pathway to climate safety? And how do we do it globally, knowing that the United States only now accounts for about 12 percent of total greenhouse gas emissions?

Well, for years now, my team and I have been in constant communication with economists and other climate modelers who specialize in predicting the effects of various emissions reduction policies. Study after study, group after group, expert after expert have said the same thing: An economywide carbon price will drive the deepest emissions reductions--which makes sense.

The cost of a product's harms, under economic principles, should be reflected in the price of the product. When they are not, it is a subsidy.

And fossil fuel floats on the fattest subsidy in human history, now clocked at over $700 billion a year in the United States alone. Put a price on that free pollution, and markets emerge to reduce emissions in the most efficient way, whether by fuel type, new technology, efficiency measures, or preventing or capturing emissions.

Here is an example of how that works. This graph from 2021, before the passage of the IRA, examines emissions trajectories in a variety of policy scenarios. The green line here, at the top, is business as usual then, which assumed no new emissions-reducing policies, and, of course, had virtually no effect.

Drop down to this orange line. It is a package of clean energy tax credits very similar to what was ultimately included in the IRA. As you can see, those tax credits result in substantial, though insufficient, emission reductions through 2030, which is here, and then they more or less flatline.

The gray line below it here is a clean electricity standard, which would have incentivized cleaner electricity generation and penalized dirtier generation in the power sector. It does slightly better than the tax credits, but it also wanes in efficacy after 2030.

Yellow line, just below it, is those tax credits, plus that clean electricity standard. It is a bit better, but it is still pretty impotent after 2030.

Then you have this light-blue line, which represents a relatively modest carbon fee starting at around $15 per ton of emissions and remaining relatively low for the first 6 years and then ramping up in outyears to roughly $80 per ton. This model actually exempts unleaded gasoline. Yet even with that exemption, it drives dramatically deeper emissions reductions, particularly after 2030. Indeed, by 2040, it almost doubles the emissions reductions of the other two policies combined.

And the lowest line, this dark-blue line, represents doing it all. And the anchor of that outcome is that modest carbon price, which is ultimately far more potent at driving emissions reductions than all other policies.

Here is another study. This one was done this year after the IRA was passed, and it reaches similar conclusions. This top yellow line--which doesn't come close to our targets--represents what would happen if, as our Republican friends have threatened, the IRA were to be repealed and EPA's recently finalized emissions rules for powerplants, cars, and trucks were struck down or rescinded. As you can see, emissions very slowly trend down due, largely, to continued deployment of wind and solar--which are now the cheapest forms of energy--and to different States' decarbonization policies.

This next line, which gets to our targets around 2040, represents a scenario in which the Inflation Reduction Act stays, but the EPA rules are voided or rescinded. Again, we don't hit our targets for 2030 until 2040, a very dangerous decade to miss.

The next line, the red line, is essentially our new business as usual. It is the IRA and the EPA rules remaining in force, and there we hit our decarbonization targets around 2037, still off by 7 years.

This light-green and light-blue line, which are very hard to distinguish, respectively increase the value of the IRA power sector clean energy tax credits by 50 percent and add a clean electricity standard. Both result in delays hitting our 2030 target until 2035.

This purplish line here adds carbon pricing, similar to the one I just discussed, with repeal of the nonpower sector tax credits in the

I ask for the yeas and nays.

Madam President, first, let me thank the chairman of our committee for attempting to bring this bill to the floor and to get us on it. Even though the Republicans have objected to Supreme Court ethics, it is important for us to continue to make the effort because the American people understand that there is something gone very wrong at the Supreme Court.

The objections that we just heard amounted to a long excursion through a great variety of topics: through abortion; through past FBI investigations; through allegations about a two-tiered system of justice; through wokeness; through things we all agree on, like separation of powers and an independent judiciary. I think it would be helpful to actually come into focus on what we are actually talking about here because most of what was said in opposition to this bill is completely irrelevant to what we are seeking to achieve.

We all accept the doctrine of separation of powers. Senator Blumenthal, who is here, is an expert in the subject. He has argued more cases in the Supreme Court than any other Senator. To be clear, our bill does not make the Supreme Court subservient to Congress in any respect. The bill obliges the judicial branch of government to create its own ethics enforcement mechanism that will be run within the judicial branch of government by the judicial branch of government. There simply is not a separation of powers concern when the judicial branch of government runs an ethics program for the judicial branch of government that is administered within the judicial branch of government. It just ain't so.

The existing state of affairs is that the ethics requirements that apply to the Justices of the Supreme Court, first, related to recusal and, second, related to disclosure of gifts are laws passed by Congress.

And the enforcement, particularly of the disclosure requirements, is done by the Judicial Conference. The Judicial Conference is a body established by Congress.

When Harlan Crow first started giving free yacht and jet travel secretly to Clarence Thomas, that question was taken up by the Judicial Conference a decade ago.

Did the Justices complain that the Judicial Conference was investigating Justice Thomas and his disclosures? No, of course not, because the argument would make no sense. So to hear it here on the Senate floor is a bit disappointing. Right now, the Judicial Conference investigates and can sanction or refer for further investigation Justices of the Supreme Court.

We are trying to fix three really simple problems: One is factfinding. Factfinding ought not to be an issue in dispute. Every member of government in the United States who is subject to any kind of supervision or ethics requirement--which is everybody--had a process whereby the actual facts are found of what went wrong. Hell, even the President of the United States had to sit for a factfinding interview about the documents in his garage. It is only nine people in the entirety of the U.S. Government who think that they have no obligation to do any factfinding. And that is pretty dangerous because we just saw Justice Alito offer facts, a description, about what went on behind his family flying MAGA battle flags over their houses that has been proven false by information that is incontestable. Police reports with dates show that he got the order of things wrong. COVID showed that it couldn't possibly have been a schoolbus stop.

So you have erroneous facts offered by Supreme Court Justices with no method to review them. Or they completely ignore the facts. Justice Thomas has refused to ever say a word about what he knew about his wife's engagement in the insurrection while he was adjudicating the rights of those investigating the insurrection.

There is nobody else in the world where somebody doesn't come in and say: Sir, we have a complaint about your conduct, and we are going to need to take a statement from you. This won't take long. I am going to ask you some questions. You will give your answers. At the end, we will ask you to review and sign your statement.

Nothing difficult about that. Nothing against the separation of powers about that. Nothing that Chief Justice Roberts couldn't require right now about that. He could have Supreme Court staff attorneys conduct exactly that kind of work right now, as the chairman has repeatedly pointed out.

Factfinding is a really basic elemental proposition of our American judicial process, and it applies everywhere. It makes no sense for the body ultimately responsible for policing proper judicial process in the United States to not allow itself to participate in that most elemental and fundamental task of there being actual factfinding.

The second is a principle so old it is in Latin, for Pete's sake: ``Nemo iudex in causa sua''; no one should judge their own case. That is pretty easy to understand. And yet we let these Justices alone in the United States--nobody else--get to be the judges of their own ethics. And, obviously, they have failed to measure up.

And the third issue is transparency, disclosure. We know perfectly well that the Justices have failed at their disclosure obligations, and they can't keep their stories straight about meeting their disclosure obligations.

We just had Justice Thomas go back into his previous disclosures to correct them and tell the world and the Judicial Conference, which was reviewing this, that his failure to file was an accidental error. It was ``inadvertent.'' But earlier he had said about the same gift from the same billionaire: Oh, those don't have to be reported. That was personal hospitality from a dear friend.

Well, which is it? Is it personal hospitality that doesn't have to be reported? Or is it something that you knew perfectly well you should have reported, and now you are going back and cleaning up an error that you are claiming is inadvertent?

The disclosure mistakes are inexcusable on their face. Federal officials who commit far less in the way of disclosure mistakes have actually been prosecuted as felons, as misdemeanants, under the criminal law for those similar disclosure violations.

So we need to get this right. All it requires is factfinding and an independent voice so it is not nemo iudex. You are not judging your own cause. Those are really basic principles. That is all we are trying to do.

It would be done by judges within the judiciary. There is no separation of powers issue. That is a complete canard.

And I will close by saying that the Judicial Conference has been helping us in all of this. The Judicial Conference has just blown up Justice Scalia's trick, which was to solicit through intermediaries free vacations from resort owners, and then when the resort owner invited him with a personal invitation, he would pretend that that was personal hospitality because it was a personal invitation, even if he had never met the resort owner. That is a preposterous reading of the personal hospitality exemption. And it is not just me saying that. The judges of the Judicial Conference said: You are right. That is preposterous. That is ridiculous. We are clarifying the rule that that is not acceptable.

And he had done it 60 times. He was a vacation-taking fiend. My Lord.

So the idea that you can trust a Supreme Court Justice, with no independent review, no factfinding, each the judge in his own cause, to follow the rules has been blown to smithereens by the conduct of the Supreme Court Justices themselves. As our chairman is fond of saying: This is a crisis in ethics at the Supreme Court

that the Supreme Court itself has created. It is a crisis in ethics of the Supreme Court that Justice Roberts himself at the Judicial Conference can solve.

But if they are not going to do it, we are going to do what we did before when we set up the Judicial Conference, when we set up the recusal laws, when we set up the disclosure laws. Set up the system, and let the judiciary enforce it.

I yield the floor.